Style, wit and pace: Netflix's Dept. Q reviewed

Spectator

9 hours ago

Can you imagine how dull a TV detective series set in a realistic Scottish police station would be? Inspector Salma Rasheed would have her work cut out that's for sure: the wicked gamekeeper on the grisly toff's estate who murdered a hen harrier and then blamed its decapitation on an innocent wind turbine; the haggis butcher who misgendered his vegetarian assistant; the Englishman who made a joke on Twitter about a Scotsman going to the chippy and ordering a deep-fried can of Coke… It would get lots of awards, obviously, but I doubt it would do that well in the ratings.
But you needn't worry about Dept. Q (Netflix). Though it is set in a police station in Edinburgh it bears about as much relation to contemporary Scotland, Scottish policing or indeed Edinburgh as, say, Midsomer Murders does to real-life English villages. Perhaps this is because – based on a novel by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen and originally set in Copenhagen – it derives from the Scandi-noir genre where every other person in the bleak, washed-out countryside and pullulatingly corrupt modern metropolis is either a bent City bigwig, an occultic serial killer – who wears antlers on his head while drawing runic symbols in blood – or the disturbed victim of some Terrible Family Secret that will only be unravelled after a series of long car and ferry journeys to remote islands where no one wants to answer questions.
Our hero is DCI Carl Morck (Matthew Goode), whose statutory unique quirks are that he's stupidly clever, incredibly grumpy and deeply traumatised having been shot in the head by the same masked gunman who crippled his colleague (and only friend) DCI James Hardy (Jamie Sives). Everyone hates him; he hates everyone in return; but you'd definitely want him solving your case, even if it's impossible, such as the one he's investigating here.
I feel bad about describing it because it might give away the game about the rather ingenious temporal device that furnishes the first episode with its satisfying final twist. (Skip to the next paragraph if you don't want it spoiled.) Essentially, a woman barrister (Chloe Pirrie) has gone missing on a ferry and her case has been closed because there were no leads or witnesses and she is presumed dead. In actual fact though – oh, the horror! – she has spent the last four years imprisoned in what looks like the metal hull of a ship, where she is psychologically and physically tortured by a vicious old woman and her sidekick who bear her some-as-yet-undisclosed grudge.
See what I mean about our being in Scandi-noir territory? This is the sort of crime almost no one ever commits in real life because even if they had the motive the logistics would be just too complicated. That's why, having hit you with this bizarre and deeply implausible scenario, the rest of the book/TV adaptation has to work so frantically hard to provide you with the convoluted psychological and organisational rationale necessary to persuade you that this hasn't all been a huge waste of your time and credulity.
Not that I'm really complaining by the way. Just like with Slow Horses – whose set up this resembles quite a lot – Dept. Qisn't really about the tortured MacGuffin of a plotline but about enjoying the company of loveable misfits. Besides Goode's adorably hateful antihero detective, these include: Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov), a deceptively gentle soul who used to be in the Syrian secret police; DCI Hardy (now bedbound but at least if he can still help solve crimes it might suppress his urge to kill himself); DC Rose Dickson (Leah Byrne), with her big red hair, bright red lipstick and mental-health issues. They work together in a dingy basement, forgotten since the 1970s, and, handily, have a decent budget because the cabinet secretary has apparently decided that it's good for optics if there's a dedicated department for solving cold cases.
All the other characters are, of course, similarly messed up. The missing woman's brother William (Tom Bulpett) has mental-health issues on account of having had his head stoven in by a mysterious hammer attacker; Kelly Macdonald's Dr Rachel Irving – aka meet-cute love interest – has been off men ever since jilting her bigamist husband at the altar; Morck's teenage stepson wears a mask and plays death metal at full volume while playing video games, etc.
Yes, the crime bits are bit warped, morbid and voyeuristic (for my tastes anyway), but the cast are great, and it's adapted and directed with such verve, style, wit and pace by Scott Frank, you can hardly not enjoy it – nor wish they'd get a move on with Season Two.